The Price of Freedom (Currency!)

Common slang for money is "Dead Presidents", but ironically, the more coveted denomination bill, the C-Note, doesn't have a former president on it at all. Neither does the 10, the $500, or the $50000. For that matter, there are two forms of dollar coin that have women on them--which even if you didn't have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the US presidents (Protip: One was named Polk--Polk and Harding were both born on Nov 2nd, the only two president's thus far sharing a birthday) to realize that neither of those women were ever US presidents.

Consequently, we've established that having dead people other than presidents on our currency is acceptable. Furthermore, they needn't even be Secretaries or Justices--or have any real political office at all. Sacajawea. It's a real thing.

This raises the question in my mind, of what merit a person need have to acquire this honorific? Benjamin Franklin in particular stands out. I mean, yeah, he wrote some letters to foment revolution--under a pseudonym. Fine, he discovered you could be electrocuted if you flew a kite in a thunderstorm. Pretty sure that people were already away being struck by lightning was a bad thing. And he did write an important work on the merits of MILFs as sexual partners. But he also moved to France after the Revolution and had a habit of wandering out onto his balcony in the nude for an 'air bath'. Take a moment to visualize that. But don't take too long. You'll regret it.

To my mind, there is an underrepresented founding father who really out to have a place on our currency, and his place is obvious. I propose the Thomas Paine penny. We could even call them Paineys. In some parts of the country, they already do and his portrait doesn't even grace our currency yet.

Thomas Paine helped foment the Revolution with his incisive polemics. In fact, he was such a staunch proponent of freedom, that after the US revolution, he went to France to help advance their revolution as well--nearly losing his head for his trouble. He was an early abolitionist and proposed the idea of universal pension and basic income--and argued for a more egalitarian society than any in memory at that time. Further, so radical and forward thinking were his beliefs, he could easily have been seen as a transcendentalist if not for dying 20 years before that movement began. Surely you can see how the author of Common Sense deserves a place on common cents?

This raises the question in my mind, of what merit a person need have to acquire this honorific?

Seems to me the pattern is: you have achieved some fairly ubiquitous positive cultural recognition, related to key events in the nation's history, while also being fairly unambiguously "American". Being a President is just one fairly direct route to that. Thomas Paine? Seems to get fuzzy on that last part, being unambiguously "American" across a ubiquitous recognition plane? Related, perhaps: putting someone on our currency is a way of America "claiming" them, like claiming the history of them as from and for America. Could we get away with "claiming" Paine as our own, as such?

Well, judging an entire concept based on the most bastardized version of it is not valid. As anyone is free to make their own currency, then you end up with crazy ideas in the mix. But, those crazy coins also must compete in the market, and CoinYe fell flat on it's face. The market has spoken, and it said,"NO!"

Most people who were involved in the market had already fled from Mt. Gox long ago. I haven't used them since the middle of last year. It was an amateurish exchange. The only reason it was so popular, at one time, was because it was the first exchange. The fall of Mt. Gox was one of the best things things that could have happened for bitcoin as a whole, even though the way it happened is horrible for everyone that still had money in there.

Professional exchanges are being developed right now, and a few of the current exchanges are quite good.